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Friday, December 18, 2015

Taking Time

Charlie and Jay have left: going out,
doing something. Somewhere I am sitting on cement, or perhaps earth,
warded and protected in all the ways of magicians save for one. Few
things are impossible for magicians, though many are deeply
ill-advised. Even Mary-Lee, once the oldest and most terrible
magician in all the world, might not have done this. But I died, and
that gives me an edge. The fae imprisoned me in a waking-awareness
for billions of years, and that taught lessons.

I find stillness in mere hours,
following it far from my body. There are places bodies cannot travel
to because magic requires certain constants to work. Perception is
one of those: the place I enter is nothing. My brain calls it white,
to call it anything at all, but it’s not that. The white is behind
me, moving. Awareness as much as purpose, the impact amused but so
very cold as well.

“Few magicians can find me,” the
voice says around me. “Even among the other Powers – most thing
me in the middle of the universe, at the moment of birthing.”

“I thought Time would want to be
where time wasn’t, at the edges of all things. Catching up to
yourself, rushing ahead.”

“Hm.” And he is beside me. Winter,
paler than white, hair long and moving in unknown winds, eyes like
hard ice. Sexless, but the body is somehow more male than female –
I think it would be different for others, but I am not certain. Few
can see the creature I can summon by name as Arth’Ba’Toch and
fewer still survive the experience. You don’t call upon Time
lightly, and the power such a Power wields is beyond anything I can
comfortable compass. “You think I won’t destroy you, little
magician?”

“I don’t know. I have questions:
there is no one else I can ask.”

“You know of Justice.”

“I don’t know how to call Lance. Or
to trust him.”

“And you trust me?” Winter asks,
dry as something long dead.

“I don’t see why Time would bother
lying. It is almost Christmas, and magicians fear the holidays. The
bindings, the desires, how magic answers need and joy: I haven’t
felt that this year, and I know that is not just Jay’s doing with
bindings. I’ve changed. I would like to know into what.”

Winter smiles, and the smile is too
kind to be human. “No one wants to know that, magician. How else
could you become if all you knew was what you be?”

“I don’t mean that.”

“I know.” Mild, a fact more solid
than any stone, more real than any world. How could Time not know?

“What am I becoming?”

“That has not yet been decided. You
are one of those who must decide, magician, wanderer – there are no
easy ways off the path you now walk. It may be that you cannot leave
it at all.”

“Jay was on it. To become the new
Grave for the Cone and the Grave, to guard the entrance of the
universe from harm.”

“So we thought. I think We were
wrong.”

I almost laugh, but I’m not sure I
could stop. The Powers that govern the functions of the universe,
that are barely forms at all – the universe works because they are
the grease that runs it, and their province is all that exists within
in. “Wrong,” I repeat instead.

“Yes.” Nothing else. Whatever
Winter suspects, it will not be shared with me.

“And me?”

“Not the Grave, no. I do not know
what. We are the custodians of the universe, but we did not make it.
The road you walk will be long and hard, and you will lose and be
made to lose again. You will be unmade and remade, lost more than
found. There is nothing I can do in this. You have gone too far down
this path.”

“I never meant to walk it,” I
manage.

“No one ever does, not if they make
it.” And Winter smiles a final time. “We will not meet like this
agaon,” he says, and I wake up in my body, the stillness I found
gone. According to the clock, I’ve only been under three hours. I
stand up slowly, stiffly, walking outside into the snow.

Inside, I am screaming at what awaits
me. But I won’t do it alone. No matter what even Time thinks,
Charlie, Jay and I have been together for too long for that to end.
Even for something like that.

I have no idea what I am going to tell
them, or even how.

I watch snow fall and I find myself
wondering how many others I will see. And how long they will matter.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”